What’s your
yichus?
The people you come from aren’t lost. They’re filed away in ship manifests, town registers and Hebrew gravestones. We find them, and turn them into whatever means most to your family: a family tree, a film, or more.
- Distinguished ancestry; descent from a family of high reputation, especially of rabbis and scholars.
- Lineage; the line of people you come from.
You have yichus.
Somewhere along the way, yichus became a word for pedigree: the famous rabbi in the line, the name that carries weight at a shidduch. By that measure, most families have none.
But the word means relation, not rank. Yichus is simply the line of people you come from, and every family has one worth knowing. Children who know theirs, researchers at Emory found, grow up more confident and more resilient.
Know your line, and you begin to add to it: yichus atzmo, the yichus you make yourself.
Five ways a family comes back.
Every project starts with the same thing: a clear answer, with a source behind every name. What you build from it is up to you.
- 01A living family treeInteractive and sourced, and honest about what is still unknown.
- 02A family filmRecords, photographs and voices, cut into minutes people watch again.
03A roots tripThe towns, the streets, the house. Planned day by day.- HIER WOHNTE• • •04A StolpersteinA name set back into the street where they last chose to live.
- 05Papers for German citizenshipThe records an application rests on, found and ordered.
Every family has a question no one at the table can answer. Let’s answer yours.
It started with Opa.
When my Opa passed away, I realized how much of his story I had never thought to ask. So I went looking. His parents, and my Nana’s, had crossed from small towns in Germany to New York, and every one of them had left a paper trail.
That search became a film my children now watch. Then it became something I never expected: helping other families find the people they come from, and feel connected to their roots again.
About us →Tell us what you know. And what you wish you did.
Tell us where your family’s story goes quiet. We’ll come back with what the records likely hold and the best way in.
For your own family, or as a gift. Few things land like handing a parent the story of their grandparents.